


Where Unicorns Go

by Montresor



Category: The Last Unicorn (1982), The Last Unicorn - All Media Types, The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
Genre: Gen, One Shot, Second Chances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-03-02 12:16:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13317918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Montresor/pseuds/Montresor
Summary: The Unicorn returns to what's left of King Haggard's castle by the sea, and discovers something there she does not expect.





	Where Unicorns Go

**Author's Note:**

> This one comes mostly from a headcanon that I liked which suggested that King Haggard was, at one point, a unicorn, but had been transformed into a man. It's canonical that a unicorn that is transfigured this way loses their memory of what they were, so this makes a lot of sense for Haggard. His chronic depression and obsession with unicorns could have been brought on by this transfiguration, and this forgetting. Also, to me it always seemed off that Haggard dies in the end, when all of his malfunction comes from a profound unhappiness. 
> 
> I imagine there aren't a lot of people out there looking for The Last Unicorn fanfiction, but if you're reading this, here's to you. <3 Thanks for reading!
> 
> If you enjoy my work, and want to see more like this, or in this fandom, please let me know in the comments. You can also find me [on tumblr](http://finevintagefiction.tumblr.com). I'm in the midst of putting together a portfolio of work, so any comments/prompts/etc you may have, are absolutely welcome. I'll be taking commissions soon!

The sea, which had been in jagged tumult, grew still again when the unicorn’s hooves touched the shore. The shrieking of the gulls turned to laughter, and the roaring waves came in, now, only to whisper. Since the collapse of King Haggard’s castle, few had dared to tread the vacant hill, which remained barren as if out of spite, when the rest of the kingdom had flourished. Not even Lír had come to this place, for the hero’s work was done, and all the unicorns imprisoned by the Red Bull and the tide had sloughed their restraints and returned to their forests.  
  
No wreckage remained of Haggard’s sullen demesnes, dissolved like more salt into the water, but some essential fragment lingered on, leaching out the colour until everything was grey. Everything, but the unicorn, shining white as distant star. She could feel the echo of her human body pressing in from all sides. That had been her prison, while the others languished beneath the whitecaps for fear of the Red Bull. They were free, now, all of them, and yet some unclaimed thing remained. Something left undone. The impulse to search lingered. She had missed the others, and looked for them, and changed, and found them again, and yet the feeling that something was missing dogged her heels. She did not leave even a hoof print behind in the sand, and still it stalked her every step.  
  
“It’s _you_.” A half-shattered skull washed up on the shore. “Yes, you. There you are. I know you. Come without the magician this time, eh? No chance at a swallow of wine before I’m back out and out to sea?” It clacked its remaining teeth. “I suppose that’s as much as I deserve,” the skull burbled as a rush of water lapped over it, “but I don’t imagine you might take a moment to crush me, would you?” Seafoam bubbled white out of the skull’s empty eye socket, running down a crack in the cheekbone. The unicorn said nothing, but lowered her horn to trace along the edges where the crown of the skull had broken open. “ _Oh_ ,” the skull whispered, and the empty socket turned dull, and darker still. The unicorn pressed on.  
  
She might have walked for an hour, a day, a century, from this land into the next, but she spied, at last, a flicker of red on the shore. The sight tugged something deep within her ancient marrow, like a hook she couldn’t remember swallowing. The unicorn would have known that red cloak if she hadn’t seen it for a thousand years. Washed up on the shore, for the sea itself refused to claim him, was the ruin of King Haggard. When the castle fell, no one had mourned for him, and no one had combed the beach, certain that this place had become his grave. And so, he lay there for the gulls to jape at, his waterlogged cloak thrown over his face, no doubt picked as clean as his bones. His limp fingers were crumbling ivory, bleached almost as white as the unicorn’s own coat. Of his armour, little more than rust was left, as if it had somehow realized that nothing could have protected that dismal king, and had abandoned him just like everything else that had once served him.  
  
It was despair, the unicorn decided, that had killed King Haggard. It might have taken her, too, for she remembered the horror of her human body, the long, dark emptiness that stretched itself out before her. And she had only been mortal for a very short time. Lír had protected her from the worst of that terrible sadness that had threatened to wrap itself around her. Haggard had had his captive unicorns, but even these, even these could only slake the sadness for a time. It had twisted him into something desperate, something ugly, and left nothing but a selfishness that could have swallowed the world, and still demanded more.  
  
 _I know you_ , he’d said, and she had been too close to human to see that knowledge for what it was. Haggard, who had seen every unicorn in the world, must have known her almost instantly. The unicorn knew him only then, in that most mortal of states. Sunken and small and nearly forgotten by all the world. She stood there by the sea for a night and a day, and when it suited her to move, she lowered her head and flicked the tattered cloak away with the tip of her horn. It sailed through the air like a bright spray of blood, revealing the fleshless face it had formerly obscured.  
  
Death can never frighten a unicorn, for it can barely touch them. They know it as well as the languages of their forests, as much a part of their realms as autumn or spring. The others would never understand the chill that the unicorn felt as she looked on that skeletal face. She remembered the feeling of her fragile human body, dying a little with every passing instant. Mirrored in Haggard’s empty eye sockets was the hideous fate that might have been hers when she forgot, at last, what she was, grew old, and grew tired. He had never looked more familiar. What had he forgotten all those miserable years ago?  
  
 _I know you,_ she thought, and bent her head to touch her horn to poor old Haggard’s forehead, where the bones had crumbled inwards to form the shape of a star. And the sea, whispering all around them, began to churn. The tide rushed in with a vengeance, swirling first around the unicorn’s fetlocks, then surging, hocks high. It consumed what was left of Haggard utterly. A wind whipped through the unicorn’s mane, glimmering like the whorls of seafoam. She was no magician, and cast no spells, but her magic was true and strong. It had brought her here, she realized, for there was one more unicorn left in the sea.  
  
The water roared and whirled, a resplendent white igniting beneath the surface, at last breaking through. He rose from the deep, the water steaming as it rolled off his back. His horn curved like a scimitar, brighter than steel, and his eyes were darker than a starless sky. Around them, the sea grew calm, lapping gently at his hooves. It would be an easy step from there to the shore, but he shied, gazing at the unicorn with the bewilderment of a creature stirred from a long, long slumber.  
  
“What have you done to me?” he asked, with the faltering might of distant thunder. Drops of water gleamed in his beard, which curled like frosted vines. He asked again, this time summoning all of the forcefulness that he had known in days gone by. “What have you done to me?” The unicorn let the question sink in, remembering it on her own breath, so long ago. She elected to put it plainly.  
  
“I don’t know.” They regarded each other, like lightning against a rain-white sky. Mortal though he had been, the unicorn that had emerged from the sea yet remembered an immortal’s patience. He let her find the words, and did not stir himself from the waves. They might have passed an eternity like this, turning the barren hill green again. As it was, some of the colour returned to the grey cliffs around them, reflecting their combined radiance. The land began to breathe, gusting winds tangling and untangling in their manes. She searched the pallor of his eyes for their former coldness, and found only wonder and grief, a longing that seemed as if it would go on forever.  
  
“Your name is Haggard,” she said.  
  
“Amalthea.” He had never called her that, but he remembered. Oh, he remembered all of it, every ugly second stretching into uglier days, months. Years. He took a step back into the sea. “I cannot go with you.” She didn’t question, but dared a step toward. He recoiled from her toward the unfathomable depths. A wave clove itself in two against him, coursing over his shoulders. “I am not like you, like the others. Not anymore. I have known despair. I have known it for so long and so well that I forgot what happiness was. There is nothing I do not _regret_.” And so they were two.  
  
In fits and starts, the unicorn tried to wrap her words around the feeling, admit that she, too, was subject to regret. That this had made her a stranger to the others, free now, as they had always been meant to be.  
  
“I know,” she said, since that was better than nothing. “Come with me.” She was afraid to venture deeper into the water, afraid that this might drive him back, and he might wander out to sea as the Red Bull had done.  
  
“You should have left me where you found me,” Haggard said. “Wasn’t that what I deserved? I, who would have made you an eternal prisoner. You and all the others.”  
  
“We are not mortal,” the unicorn reminded him, “and we do not hold their grudges.”  
  
“ _I_ am!” His voice made the sky tremble and go dark, as he grew ever brighter and more terrible. “What part of me, but for this body, could be anything else? I was mortal. I was released, at last! And you have disturbed my bones to make me _this?_ ” For a moment, he lowered his silver head, and the unicorn thought that he might attack.  
  
“I did not choose this shape for you,” she said quickly, for she could not bear the thought of fighting him, “and I do not know what was done to you to make you forget. Please, come with me.” Haggard blew out a breath, steaming against the cold. He raised his head again, uncertain, but challenging.  
  
“Why?”  
  
For a moment, the unicorn remembered Molly Grue, who had handled the grey king so deftly. If only she could be here now to make some sense of things.  
  
“Why not?” she asked. “Everything has changed. Come and see it.” She retreated toward the shore, though her eyes stayed on the horizon, where the waves touched the sky. “You can always go back.”  
  
Haggard wheeled as if he had decided already, as if he might bolt into the depths, never to be seen again. And perhaps that might have been best. The unicorn did not pretend to know. She took another step onto the land. For a time, there was nothing between them but the cachinnations of the gulls thermalling overhead. She might have left him there, but if he chose the depths, she felt that someone should be there to see it. The silence turned brittle and cracked on Haggard’s next breath.  
  
“I am afraid,” he said. “Just as I was before. And I am not like you. I have done such evil, and I—”  
  
“You cannot run. If you truly regret, you know that there is no place in the world where you could ever escape.” That seemed to strike him, somehow, and he hung his head, as if some unseen weight had settled upon him.  
  
“You are right.” The decisiveness that he had had as a king had not been lost in this reawakening, and having decided, he emerged from the water. He looked at the unicorn for a long moment, as though some haze had prevented him from seeing her clearly until then. “I am sorry,” he said, “for all that I did to you and the others. I was lost.”  
  
“I know,” she answered. Without another word, she started up the hillside, letting a new silence settle between them. There was no discomfort, for that quiet would last only as long as it was meant to, and the great weight of Haggard’s presence could not trouble the unicorn, for she knew what he carried with him. It was only regret, and nothing to be afraid of; it was a sorrow they could outlive, and greater joys were still ahead.  
  
All around them, the barren hilltop bloomed anew, verdant green overtaking the dour  grey shadow that had once haunted these shores. The sea shone, radiant azure, as if the sunlight could reach its surface for the first time in decades. The unicorns made their way to the very top of the hill, where not even the foundations of Haggard’s castle remained and together, they watched as the tide began to turn.


End file.
